CHILD'S-EYE VIEW
N Gertrude Hutchinson’s BBC programme, The Fabians and I, we had a glimpse of Beatrice Webb raising her eyes from a monumental work on child labour long enough to discover that the Fabian Research Department was employing a child who couldn’t be a day older than seven. She demanded that it be sent home. Her colleagues assured her it was fourteen and pointed out that if it were sent home it would certainly have to get a much less pleasant job. So the Cockney child from Peckham stayed on and the Fabians salved their consciences by sending her to school two afternoons a week and presenting her with a copy of Alice in Wonderland, whose characters soon became identified
in Gertrude’s mind with several of the leading Fabians. Bernard Shaw was wotshipped from a _ distance, though there was a sharp drop in his prestige when he predicted in the Sunday Dispatch that Carpentier would beat Dempsay, and he didn’t; younger Fabians wrote comic songs about T-t-t-trotsky and took Gertrude to the ballet. It was all. innocence and kindness and a marvellous escape, one gathered, from her family in Peckham, and especially from her father, after whom even H. G. Wells’s tantrums couldn’t frighten her. It certainly gave this listener an attractive and surprising new light on the Fabians.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19570308.2.23.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 917, 8 March 1957, Page 14
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220CHILD'S-EYE VIEW New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 917, 8 March 1957, Page 14
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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